Posts Tagged ‘BitStamp’

It seems that tying together Gold and Bitcoin is getting more and more popular as one of the large European Bitcoin exchanges Bitstamp has just announced that they are now also offering a new method of withdrawing funds in the form of physical gold to their EU clients. The Bitcoin exchange has partnered with Moro & Kunst d.o.o. – an internationally recognized precious metals reseller operating in Slovenian, Austrian and Croatian financial market since 1993. Gold prices are quoted in USD and updated every 5 minutes and at the moment, purchase is only available with USD. Before submitting an order, USD balance must be available, so this means that you need to sell BTC for USD first and you cannot yet directly exchange Bitcoins for Gold. Fully insured gold shipment comes with a tracking number and will be delivered within 2 to 5 business days after the order is placed with optional personal pickup also available in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The service is currently only available in: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom.

There are already quite a few companies that allow you to buy physical Gold with Bitcoin and there is also BitGold that allows you to buy Gold with BTC as well and use it as a means for everyday digital payments. So the options to turn a crypto currency such as Bitcoin to Gold and either spend it for payments or get it in physical form as a long term investment are there, but the question that is more important is if it is worth doing this at the moment. Gold has been a good long term storage of value for ages, but keeping Bitcoins has the potential of good profit on the long term with the increase of the value of the coin, though this is also riskier. Then again why should you stay with everything invested into a single thing such as BTC, a good investment broker would always advice you to diversify your portfolio and that does not mean in other crypto currencies only.

New York’s controversial BitLicense has driven away two more Bitcoin exchanges away from NY, these are Kraken and Bitfinex who are not going to be applying for the BitLicense at this time. Both exchanges will stop servicing clients living in the state of New York in order to avoid complications due to the financial regulation change. Another large Bitcoin exchange, namely BitStamp, apparently has plans for applying for a BitLicense in order to be able to continue to operate in New York. The biggest concerns that people have with the BitLicense regulations is regarding their privacy and since Bitcoin and crypto currencies are more privacy oriented it is no wonder that crypto currency businesses decide to get out of NY instead of applying for BitLicense.

After a few days being offline the hacked Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp is back online and the service operators claim to have significantly improved the security. The hack of the exchange that has apparently happened on January 4th some of Bitstamp’s operational wallets were compromised, resulting in a loss of less than 19000 BTC. The exchange has promised that there will be no actual coins missing from the user accounts, so they are apparently going to cover the stolen coins. Below you can find the list of the improvements to the system now that it is back online and operational.

MULTI-SIG
With the integration of BitGo multi-sig technology, Bitstamp is now the first and only major bitcoin exchange to incorporate the industry’s best security practices available today.

COMPLETELY NEW HARDWARE INFRASTRUCTURE
The Bitstamp systems are running on 100% new hardware deployed from a completely secure backup of our code and data.

AMAZON WEB SERVICES
Bitstamp is now running on Amazon’s world-class AWS cloud infrastructure, architected to be one of the most secure and reliable cloud computing environments available.

COMMISSION-FREE TRADING
As a note of thanks to our loyal customers, all transactions conducted on Bitstamp through the end of the North American Bitcoin Conference – January 17th (at 11:59pm UTC) – will be commission-free.

The big question that remains now is if Bitstamp will be able to quickly return the positions it had prior to being hacked and being offline for a few days. So far the exchange apparently hasn’t lost the trust of many of the users, but still some of the people that used Bitstamp as a primary exchange could decide to move their coins and continue trading in another alternative exchange due to the downtime and may not resume using the service now that it is back online.

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